Standing in Line

(I found this on my phone and apparently I forgot about it and never posted it)

A line of disparate parents snakes through the post office and out the door into the frozen December air. Last call for packages. Send them tomorrow and maybe they do or don't arrive on time. No one talks. Most just look around at the quaint turn-of-the century building: tiles, hardwood, lead paned glass. Outside these walls a quaint downtown unfolds with some dammed river rolling by: indolent.

These lines are the kind where you stand holding your package, not trying to notice the other person holding their package. I try not to make eye contact because I can't imagine anything of interest coming out of my mouth. I am not unhappy, but not really happy either. Just checking stuff off a list.

This one one of the last rites of Christmas: shipping off the gifts. Its when you care enough about your relatives to send something, just not enough to actually visit. I don't know. There's all this pressure to visit. I am a bad person for not going to see friends and family. It doesn't make me want to go more often, that's for sure. The thought of any potentially additive guilt is enough to keep me away. I am full-up on guilty here. No need for more. The crushing expense, the memories I try to avoid, the expectation of expectation. The visits. Sometimes I wish I could hide. Back up. Retreat.

And so I stand there, eyes fixed on my pile of boxes, trying not to watch the other people trying to watch their boxes. We are the same. Guilty of not visiting. Of letting a plastic toy from China speak for our hearts. Its probably why we don't look. All stares in other directions. Not the line to the sole postal agent.

We share a community of idyllic homes, manicured nails and lawns, of sanctuary from the world around us. Livestyles dearly bought. Choices made. Things picked, and cool though they may be, these picks were things. Not people. The things piling up and up into walls of suburban crap to deflect away the realities found in humanity. In the needs of the people around us. In myself. Dammed things.

So finally its my turn and the agent looks up at me, his grey hair and blue eyes curiously matching his grey-blue uniform. He takes the items. I pay, and turn quickly to leave as his toneless voice mumbles happy something or other. I want to leave. Go. Hide. Retreat. Return to my walls of dammed things and the damnation I have been practicing there. There are people in that retreat whom I love dearly. For whom I would carve an oasis from the reality of life. I love them. I want to retreat to the retreat and hold them.